Mass procurement and prey rankings: insights from the European rabbit

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(2020) 12:262

ORIGINAL PAPER

Mass procurement and prey rankings: insights from the European rabbit Eugène Morin 1,2

&

Rebecca Bliege Bird 3 & Douglas Bird 3

Received: 19 June 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract In the archeological record, the presence of smaller-bodied species is often assumed to indicate a decline in higher-ranked, largerbodied prey and broadening of the diet to include lower-ranked items with higher handling costs. This shift is typically considered to be a product of a “broad spectrum revolution” that gave rise in many regions to increased sedentism, subsistence intensification, and investments in farming at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. However, recent evidence suggests that the use of small, fast prey may have emerged much earlier in hominin evolution than previously appreciated. Here, we assess ethnographic, historical, and actualistic observations of European rabbit hunting to explore whether such small, fast prey are inherently lowerranked than larger ones. We find that, in combination, the type of procurement method and the population density of rabbits substantially affect foraging returns and the definition of prey types. When rabbits are locally abundant and mass-captured in the open, on-encounter returns are predictably high, sometimes higher than those of large-bodied ungulates. We suggest that rabbit hunting may have been locally and intermittently common during the European Middle and Late Pleistocene as rabbit densities waxed and waned. Keywords Hunting . European rabbit . Mass procurement . Fauna . Zooarchaeology . Archaeozoology

Introduction Patterns of animal exploitation often play a central role in debates about the behavioral adaptations of Paleolithic foragers, particularly the problem of dietary variation and its implications for our understanding of the origins of broad spectrum economies. Expansion of diet to include a wide range of lower-ranked, presumably smaller, prey has increasingly dominated these discussions, as it may indicate the emergence of resource intensification and the socioThis article is part of the Topical Collection on Do good things come in small packages? * Eugène Morin [email protected] 1

Department of Anthropology, Trent University, DNA Bldg Block C, 2140 East Bank Drive, Peterborough, Ontario K9J 7B8, Canada

2

Université de Bordeaux, PACEA, Bat. B18, Allée Geoffroy St-Hilaire CS 50023, 33615 Pessac Cedex, France

3

Department of Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, 410 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA

ecological factors that might influence it (e.g., Grayson and Delpech 1998, 2002, 2003; Aura Tortosa et al. 2002; Hockett and Haws 2002; O’Connell 2006; Stiner 2013; Jones 2016; Lloveras et al. 2016; Wißing et al. 2016; Starkovich and Ntinou 2017). One issue clouding our interpretation of diet breadth as a form of intensification has been the problem of hunting efficiency and the rankings of various categories of prey in human diets

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